George Michael has no memory of health scare

British singer George Michael has suffered memory loss as a result of his life-threatening pneumonia battle last year.

The former Wham! frontman was hospitalized with the potentially deadly lung condition in Vienna, Austria in November, and he spent several weeks under doctors’ care before he was allowed to return to his native U.K.

Michael admits he had been ignoring telling signs about his deteriorating health a few weeks earlier, when he came down with a fever before a gig at London’s Royal Albert Hall.

He tells BBC Radio, “I took it for granted that I’d just fought off flu. I went and played for another three weeks in Europe. And then one afternoon I was having lunch and suddenly felt really odd and said to everyone that I had to go and lay down for half an hour on my own.”

Michael was hospitalized soon afterwards, but he has no memory of the whole ordeal.

He says, “That’s the last thing I remember for five weeks. It was three weeks of them trying to save my life and two weeks awake.”

And the star insists it took him some time to come to terms with his fragile state after his near-death experience: “When something like that happens in such a random fashion, I think it takes a while to think that life is safe again.

“I literally had to learn to walk again and weird stuff, because when they keep you sedated for that long your muscles literally atrophy at an incredible rate. I just woke up like this feeble old man.”

Michael has since drawn inspiration from the scary experience for his new single, “White Light.”